November 11-12, 2013

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Program

Inspecting a multi-everything Linux machine

Utilizing Hardware

12 November 1:50pm - 2:40pm @ Cromwell 1-2

Experience level:

Intermediate

Duration:

50 minutes conference

Come to this talk if you want to understand better how a multi-core multi-disk system operates and how you can inspect its operation on Linux in order to measure utilization for capacity planning, or just for fun.
Long gone the days when a commodity server had one single-core CPU, one disk and understanding system utilization was as easy as checking that load average is below 1. Yet some still think of system as highly utilized if not saturated when the system load average goes above and beyond 2-3.
What does load average really mean on a multi-core multi-disk server? Why are my tasks still slow if CPU is never more than 13% utilized? How much more disk resources do I have? Why can't my application read data any faster even though we have 50 disk array now? Answers to these and many similar questions you will have after this talk.
I will begin this talk by looking at the broad picture of how the key elements of the system all come into play - how a multi-component system operates on the high level and what does that mean to the system user (and system administrator of course). Then I will discuss what tools we can use to understand better what is our system really doing at any given moment and what does that have to say about system utilization.

Speakers

Aurimas began using MySQL for various demanding web projects in 1999, while working as a system administrator. In 2002, he moved to a dedicated server hosting startup to work as a performance engineer - performance optimization service was key to this company's success. Years later, in 2007 he joined a MySQL consulting company Percona where he has been working as a MySQL performance consultant ever since.
During his career, both as a system administrator and as performance engineer, Aurimas got familiar with many different technologies by actually using them in different contexts. He always knows the right tools for the task. In addition to MySQL performance optimization, his key areas of expertise include: MySQL High Availability, full text search, content caching techniques, and MySQL data recovery.